Category: Miscellaneous

Locking Adjustable Latches

We bought adjustable latches with a little extra metal bit where you can lock them. The problem, however, is that the range of adjustment is limited by the lock attachment point. Eventually, the screw bumps into the lock attachment and you cannot adjust the lock any smaller. If they had offset the lock attachment point, you could adjust the latch the full length of the threading.

Because we needed some smaller latches, we had to use a hacksaw to cut off some of the threads. Now it can be screwed down to its smallest size and our baby chickens are secured in their tractor.

Using Excel To Decrypt ROT

Anya has made us a scavenger hunt complete with clues — clues that are encrypted! While working out a ROT-1 or ROT-2 decryption isn’t terribly difficult, it was getting a little time consuming [especially when what was advertised as ROT-1 was actually ROT-(25) and I had to do it all over again!], so I made a quick spreadsheet to decrypt strings. The letter pairs are in the first two columns, then VLOOKUP is used to convert the printed character to the actual one. I found a trick card!

Nothing like a fish

I had an older friend explain why he was absolutely certain his wife and he were going to have a long, happy marriage (they’d been married for a few decades by this point, so he wasn’t speculating). They went on vacation to a small town to get married and honeymoon. Small enough town that the wedding license department and fishing license department (as well as all of the other government functions) were in the same place. Dude wanted to get a fishing license, so he offered to go get both. Shows up and gets his fishing license. Then asks about the wedding license. Government dude says the wedding license dude is on vacation today. Come back tomorrow. My friend asked if government dude could do it. Nope, cannot do it. Friend asked what if his girlfriend looked like a fish, was that close enough? They laughed, and government dude said both people need to be here anyway … so come back tomorrow, and bring her. We’ll get you sorted.

He goes back to their hotel, tells her they both need to be there, and that license dude wont be in the office until tomorrow. The next day, they head back. Dude and his girlfriend walk into the office, and government dude looks at them and says ‘you are wrong, she looks nothing like a fish!”. Future wife says “how about now” and makes her best fish face. They all laugh.

He told me there’s nothing wrong with not wanting your spouse to make fun of your face. And there’s nothing wrong with joking around either. The problem is when the two people aren’t on the same page. They could still make it work, but the jokey partner is going to go through life having to curb their immediate impulse to turn something into a joke. Or the other partner is going through life being humiliated by someone who is supposed to love and support them.

Costco

We’d talked about joining Costco for years — a new store was built not too far from my office, and they had a membership promo. It was rather far away from our house; and, without checking it out first, hard to tell if it was a good deal. Especially without storage space for, say, a gallon of lemon juice. As we’ve been producing more at home — vegetables, meats — we’ve also gotten a lot of storage space. Loads of canning jars, chest freezers, vacuum sealer, shelves. So the idea of buying twenty pounds of apples is now appealing — can a bunch of apple sauce and apple butter 🙂

So, on Friday, we went out to Costco and got a membership. They’ve got a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, we were there about an hour before closing (why in the world would a company have limited hours on the weekend?!) and didn’t get to check out everything. Lots of electronics — a big TV that Scott would have loved to get. A couple of mesh WiFi systems. Fridges (not the one I want to get, unfortunately). And the expected huge containers of foods. Stuff I have a hard time finding in the grocery store too — they never have thick cut pork chops, so I end up getting a whole loin and cutting my own. But there were really nice 1″+ chops sitting right in a cooler. A tasty looking kale pesto. And a huge bag of frozen mango chunks (also a similarly huge bag of blueberries that I hope to not need in a year or two once our bushes start producing!). The coolest thing was that they’re loaded up with organic options (that are generally cheaper than the non-organic variety at the grocery store).

We also learned something about pickup trucks. They are great for hauling home the materials to build a chicken pasture fence. They’re great for hauling chest freezers. They are not great for bringing home groceries … I get why people have those tarp things that pull over the bed. We loaded all of the heavy (and low wind resistance) things into the truck bed, but ended up piling a bunch of lighter / breakable things in the cab with Anya.

Overall, the place seems like a score. And very much in line with my mom’s parents’ approach to living out in the country on a mountain. They’d not plan on going anywhere from October through April — stock up on food, get supplies for any winter projects, and just do their thing for six months. An approach that seems far more reasonable now that I’ve got my own couple hundred foot driveway curving up a mountainside.

On Wealth

People seem to assume the fact you’ve managed to amass money to be a fact that vouches for you … like you cannot be inept / senseless / bad at managing money because, look at that, you’ve got money. Doesn’t matter if you inherited (and subsequently lost much of) a bigger load of money, managed to injure yourself in some stunningly original way that requires some company to fork over millions, tripped over your untied shoelaces and discovered the lost Civil War gold. You have money, so you’re awesome at life.

It makes me think of the towel in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series — encounter someone while you’re wandering and, if they’ve managed to keep track of something so trivial as their towel, then they’ve obviously got it together.

Ten million companys’ immunization and contact tracing processes

Pushing responsibility down as far as possible (local government, companies, individuals) is nice in theory, but we keep running up against the reality that people *aren’t* responsible. And we end up with a menagerie of policies that are, best case, uncoordinated and worst case at odds with each other. Go from town to town, you’ll encounter different restrictions. Go from store to store, you’ll encounter different restrictions. I get wanting freedom — I don’t want someone telling me what colour car I am going to drive or what we’ll be doing to relax Friday night. But I don’t see a difference between “the government taking my freedom” and “the company that I work for taking my freedom”. People like to pretend that it’s my choice to work there, thus not really something being forced upon me. Sure, in theory, you can go find a different workplace (University, elementary school, etc) that doesn’t have the restriction to which you object. The practical reality, though, is different. You need money to support yourself – buy food, pay rent, make sure the heat is on – so you cannot just not work. You may not be able to move halfway across the country to work at your perfect employer. Your perfect employer may not have any openings. Or they may elect to hire someone else. Being financially coerced into ceding my freedom isn’t better than the government enacting a restriction.

And there are just some things that are ineffective without a centrally coordinated policy. And that means that, occasionally, you lose the right to chose for yourself.
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